Dom has posted

a load of photos of the gig. Thanks, man!

Home sweet home.

At last: the gig is past, the flat has entered the 21^st century and has an internet connection and I can write this from the comfort of a Sunday with absolutely nothing to do.

First off, thanks to everyone that came along! I was amazed by the number of people who made it - again - in response to our traditional barrage of TM spam. Now, onto a rather subjective review of the gig. Apologies for the navel-gazing self-absorption that is to follow.

The set-up for the gig went without incident, and even by 8 pm, with 8 Million Ways to Die strapping on their guitars and about to play, I was still feeling excited as opposed to nervous. Their set went impressively smoothly: for a band that had only been practicing together for a matter of weeks, they played and sang with relaxed competence. I started to get nervous.

(I'd seen Keith nodding frustratedly towards his snare at one point, with an expression that said "if I had a free hand I'd smack my forehead in stunned annoyance", but it turned out that he had only forgotten to turn it on. I'd go on to replicate something like this with alarmingly familiar results, but more on that later.)

Proxy, basically, rocked. Andy's introduction of the band waltzed knowingly and gleefully into Spinal Tap territory and the audience loved it. Like 8MWTD, they're consummate musicians and again, I think, this gives them a relaxed air and ability to play through setbacks like Thomas' guitar getting tangled up in a mic stand without freaking out. A repertoire of genuinely sing-a-long tunes helps, I suppose! I continued to get nervous.

We climbed on stage around 10 and strapped our guitars on, checked our effects settings and lanched straight into Dead On *. We played as tightly as we ever have before, and the new bass + drums intro worked better than I could have hoped.

Mart introduced us (to general crowd approval, I think) and we played on through the rest of the set. At the time it felt rocky rather than rocking. We made some horrifically obvious mistakes (a favourite being that a few songs just sort of vanished rather than ended), including, in retrospect, a hilarously idiotic move on my part: I played the entire first verse of Seven Nation Army a full tone too high.

I realised my mistake half way through the verse and stared at Doug with utter dread. "I'm playing it too high," I mouthed at him. This, however, was not my worst mistake. We reached I Predict a Riot and I picked up my beer from beside the bass amp. "Odd," I thought. "Does the red light mean 'on' or 'standby'?"

I looked a little closer. "Red: standby", it read. "Christ on a crutch," I thought. "Not again."

Sigh. I switched it on in time for us to play IPAR really rather well, and to follow it up with a encore of Happy 2/34^th Birthday.

It turns out we've got some solid original tunes (Dead On, One Thing and Happy 2/34^th Birthday stand out as being most fully-formed and backed up by audience approval) and covers to which we do justice rather than murder, but what we lack is gigging experience.

The best thing for me, and something of a revelation, was Mart's vocal performance. The majority of comments I heard about our set were along the lines of "Mart's singing was great! He's a good frontman." I'd never doubted that he could sing with the best of them, but it was the lack of nerves that amazed me. I think Doug and I had both regressed to some year-past state of marginal unease, but Mart carried it off superbly. Ash also took on the keyboard parts without fuss and probably out-played most of us without batting an eyelid :)

From my point of view, TM's slot at the gig was a bit like (please forgive the terribly nerdy analogy) Luke Skywalker's X-wing: unpredictable and rusty, but basically cool. I can't wait to do it again (mainly to prove that I can actually play the bass) and with any luck, that'll be mid-April. Bring it on!

P.S: With reference to a previous comment, Dave says my hair has gone a bit WarGames. Hmm.

* This version of Dead On was the sole survivor of a 6-hour recording session at Berkeley 2 about 6 months ago. There's always been a good song in there, but I think this gig was the first live outing that really did it justice. Austen in particular was generous with his praise and that was the first point that I started thinking that perhaps we hadn't quite so terrible as I'd initially thought...!

Sternum? Damn near killed 'um.

Good: we now have an internet connection in the flat, so despite the fact that I don't have any time for an update today, you can look forward to a ramblingly self-promotional gig review sometime later this week.

Medium: TM continues to get better in the face of said gig, and I for one am in a dual state of happy and fearful anticipation.

Bad: somehow, a drunken Jez managed to punch a drunken me directly in the centre of my chest on Saturday evening, leaving me unbruised but with an irritating inability to stand up, cough or laugh without wince-inducing pain. At least it's not my fingers...

For the first time ever,

I've been on the guest list for a gig. And I'm not talking about a Tiny Monkey one either.

Ash used to work with a guy called Scott in the kitchen at Assembly. "You should meet him; he's a bassist too," she said one day.
"Really? What's his band called?"
"The Bluetones, I think. Is that a band? The Bluetones?"
"Bloody hell. He's a real bassist."

And so it came to pass that we swanned into the Liquid Room with Ashley's friend Giancarlo in tow and barged to the front with our pints, in time for Neat People, the support band. They were serviceably good, if a little reliant on marginally twee Beach Boys-esque harmonising and clearly hailed from the Franz Ferdinand school of drumming.

(Incidentally, and this is really only relevant to band types, what the hell is going on with drummers at the moment? In common with Neat People, every single time we arrive at a rehearsal room, some art-rock indie type has unscrewed the smallest tom-tom and moved the other one into its place. Doug already moves glacially slowly when setting up (no offence, Doug :) and the last thing we need is some floppy-fringed, sub-FF fool messing around with the only rock drumming set-up he'd ever need if only he listened to a bit more Zep. Thank you for listening.)

The Bluetones, on the other hand, know which side their drumming bread is buttered on. Despite the fact I never followed them beyond the dying days of Brit-pop, rather a lot of people clearly have, and just about every song was sung along with by the audience. A few songs were also moshed along to by an out-of-place and alarming ned contingent, who spent the evening shouting "Slight Return! Slight Return!" I can only assume that these are the people keeping Oasis' record sales alive.

They did play Slight Return. And, in a stroke of genius, Push The Button. It was only kept from being an excellent gig by the fact that the bar closed at 10 pm or so.

Somehow we ended up backstage ('backstage' at the Liquid Room being more or less a shed) and were furnished with some beer while other more important people talked to the band. I tried to be impressed, but it was a shed. We met up with Scott again later in the Wash and I bought him a drink in return, thinking that on balance, I perhaps got the better deal from the evening.

An excellent night all round, really! Although there's no real comparison to be made, I was reminded how good TM's previous gigs were to play (if not to attend!) and I'm getting all in a lather about the next one. Forward the Monkey!

In other news, the flat's heating is on the fritz and I've been wearing hiking socks for the past two days. More on that later, given that it's high time I went back to the (freezing, sub-zero) flat.

We're in a wilderness

between practices, and it feels weird. As soon as Doug gets back from Munich we're thrown into sessions every other night and the suspense is killing me. Will we prevail? Will we rock? Damn straight we will. Come along and join in the fun! Proxy return, along with 8 Million Ways To Die, and I've got a good feeling about this gig.

I managed to go boarding on Saturday with Ashley and Kerstin, after false starts, parking tickets, sold-out hire places and full to the brim ski areas all tried to stop us. We went to Glenshee in the end, arriving just in time for the weather to close in and try seriously to flay the skin from our faces.

We hiked along the ridge from from the top of Cairnwell chair and ended up coming down the race track area, dodging the burn at the bottom but somehow managing to get off to a reasonable start. Ash was particularly good given she hasn't skiied in the last decade, although I think the vicious conditions (and even more vicious Pomas) were a bit of a handful for Kerstin.

We got a few decent runs down Carn Aosda before fatigue, wind burn and rocks got the better of us. We must have spent something obscene like £10 per run all in, with gear, lift pass and petrol taken into account. I was so tired - as much from late nights, boozing and work as boarding, to be honest - to get all that worked up about this ridiculous excess, so we headed home with nary a self-righteous rant to be heard. After a copper had helped us get the Saab out of the snowy car park, mind you.

Talking of the Saab, I drove home to use Dad's shiny new garage to change the oil. I've never done anything remotely mechanical on a car before bar changing a tyre, and this was a whole new area of problems waiting to happen. Mercifully it went well; the sump plug came out and went in without any cross-threading drama, and after ten minutes of grunting and ligament stretching, the oil filter finally came loose. It's as if the designers decided, after coming up with ingenious solutions to every other design problem they faced, to throw in the towel on this most mundane part.

"Dammit! The øil filter wøn't fit anywhere else, Bjørn. Only a lubricated midget cøntørtiønist will be able to change it. What can we dø?"
"Ah, leave it, Benny. We must hunt elk nøw, and reminisce abøut raping and pillaging."

Still, the Saab (possibly to be christened the Trøll - other suggestions on a postcard, please) remains incredibly solid. Definitely the best £950 I've ever spent. Apart from that Cristal, Columbian marching powder and crystal meth fuelled, hilarious and ultimately fatal vomit-caked romp in Bratislava that one time. But that's another story.